Here We Are in 2025

Hello readers!

It’s been a while. I have spent the entirety of 2024 finishing and polishing one novel and immediately starting a new one–its sequel–as soon as I sent the completed manuscript off to the publisher. (I like the characters too much to let them go without telling more of their story. It happens.)

With my head in this all-absorbing fictional world for so many months, I find it hard to transition to writing promotion mode. But for the next few paragraphs, I’d like to tell you a little about the book I just finished in the hopes you’ll be as excited to immerse yourself in its world as I have been. If you’ve read any of my books, you won’t be surprised that I’m writing about people and relationships, a human’s propensity for making mistakes and the desire to eventually confront and repair the damage of those. Folks like you and me, trying to do their best and picking themselves up to try again when they don’t. You may be surprised, though, that the storyline goes international! I have always wanted a reason to set a story in London and elsewhere in Britain. These characters, and their movements through time and space, gave me that reason.

Here’s a brief synopsis for you:

“What’s done is done.”

Nine-year-old Noel Enfield first hears this piece of her loving-but-stoic grandmother’s life advice when she arrives on the woman’s doorstep accompanied by a social worker and the terrible news that Noel’s mother had been killed in a car accident. Amid the bewilderment and grief, Gran suggests that Noel must learn to put tragedies behind her and relegate them to the past; that way forward builds resilience. Noel takes the lesson to heart.

At age eighteen, while studying art history at a London university, Noel falls passionately in love with aspiring artist and art school student, Bryn Jones. Shortly after Bryn leaves for a five-month painting trip through Italy, Noel discovers she is pregnant. She is ecstatic and believes Bryn will be too–they have plans to marry, after all. But mishaps and misunderstandings part the two lovers, and, desperate, Noel channels her grandmother’s counsel once again, this time choosing to move forward in a way that will change not only her life but the lives of everyone she loves.

Three decades later, when she is offered a six-month secondment to a London museum, Noel decides it’s time to prove she really has moved on from that difficult period by returning to the city where she met and lost Bryn. But rather than proving she has persevered, the move lands Noel in the thick of London’s insular art world, and only one or two degrees of separation from her past and the people she once loved. After she reconnects with an old, dear friend and learns finally what kept Bryn from returning to her all those years ago, the revelation rocks the very underpinnings of her life. Some decisions made in the past could never be put behind her, she realizes, and armed with this new understanding, she sets out on a journey to reclaim what–and who–she left behind.

This book has a working title that I won’t share with you, as it looks like the title will change sometime later this month. I’m all for that! My working titles tend to keep me focused on a book’s big themes but may not necessarily work in a commercial sense. I hope to release the new title and the cover art soon.

I can tell you, however, when you’ll see this new work: February 10, 2026. While that may seem eons away, I’ll need every single day of the next year working closely with the publisher to make sure you all get the best book you can from me. January 2025 launches the process with the title change. Then, in no particular order, comes cover art approval, procuring book blurbs and industry reviews, entering into several rounds of proofreading for typos and subsequent corrections, completing the book’s tip sheet (a behind-the-scenes sales/marketing document that helps a publisher’s sales team position any book into its proper markets), and launching strategic publicity efforts. (In case you’ve ever wondered why there are so many months between a book being accepted by a publisher and its landing on bookshelves!)

When it finally does land in your hands, I hope you will love this book as much as I do. For at its core, this is a book about love: a mother’s love, a first love, deep and enduring friendships, the kind of love that is very real but somehow incongruously hard–complicated as it can be by time and circumstance and the baggage humans carry, and the kind of love that can be so very simple if only we let ourselves accept it. The novel is also about other essential human pursuits, such as making art and creating beauty and taming the demons by releasing that beauty into the world. For me, the relentless pursuit of love, as well as the urge to create light in the darkness, defines what it is to be human.

and . . . Coda

I send my wishes to you all for an upcoming year filled with peace and community. Why not noisemakers and parties, prosperity and lots of happy, you ask, all the things people usually hope for at the cusp of a new year? Why peace? Why community?

As I get older, I better understand that new years always begin with some uncertainty. Who among us can know what a year has in store? I couldn’t have told you last December 31 that a longtime couple’s decision to marry would take us by joyful surprise or that a usually healthy loved one would have a health scare. Humans aren’t good at predicting the distant future; often we can’t even predict what will happen tomorrow. So, instead of an impossible-to-promise state of constant happiness, I wish you peace–inside yourselves, within your homes, among your friends and co-workers. Peace as a quiet starting place for concentration and creation and caring for your people. I hope you foster community within these peaceful spaces, leaving no room for prolonged periods of an isolation that breeds dread and fear. Find your people, keep them close, promise you will be their safe space and hope the same of them in return. As I said earlier: this relentless pursuit of all kinds of big love and light defines us. It will be what sustains us too.

-Jane xx

Photo caption: Early New Year’s morning, 2016. The line for pizza, Rome. Taken by the author.